Delmar Divide

About 250 St. Louis area Catholics and other residents symbolically walked across Delmar Boulevard, the street signifying the city’s racial and economic divides, as part of what they called a “pilgrimage” Saturday.

Our world is never free of conflict. There are many “we” versus “they” imbroglios in which an exalted group lets pride lead to disdain, second-class status, or even violence against those outside the group. The lines of demarcation include race, ethnicity, religion or nationhood.

A project designed as a bridge across Delmar Boulevard begins construction this week and should be in place in early February. It's a contemporary concept with a low-tech twist: hand-delivered letters.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon. - Every morning when I wake up, the first thing I do is reach for my phone and check my email and my Facebook notifications. If there are no notifications and no children needing breakfast, I peruse my Facebook feed.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: University City residents, shoppers and diners may soon see a small wall go up in The Loop. But it’s not designed to be a barrier -- it’s meant to be a bridge.

This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Last year’s Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts event around disparity on the two sides of Delmar Boulevard has produced plenty of discussion. On Sunday, the public gets a chance to help decide how to translate some of that talk into action, through competing proposals that range from farming to music-making to a wailing wall.

The “Delmar Divide” refers to Delmar Boulevard in St. Louis. It is a street which runs east/west and to a large extent separates the racial make-up of the city. In a sample of households north and south of Delmar, residents south of Delmar Boulevard are 73% white, while residents north of Delmar are 98% African American, as the BBC pointed out in, “Crossing a St. Louis street that divides communities,” last year.

Jack Straughter was a pipefitter in the 1960s when he and his wife were looking for a new house for their family of seven, and so he could have afforded to live almost anywhere in the city of St. Louis. But as a black man, there were places he never considered looking.